Upon looking at tonight’s slate, a few players stick out from a salary standpoint. DFS is all about those economics, but you don’t need to be a genius with numbers to figure that out. Using the Trends tool, I’ve found some players tonight who are in prime spots to either over or underperform based on their monthly salary change.
SP Jose Berrios
One pitcher that caught my eye is Jose Berrios. The Twins youngster wowed in his first start of the season with a shutout but has since fallen back to reality. He’s allowed either four or five earned runs in each of his past four starts, the worst of which came three starts ago when he dipped below the equator and went for -6.05 DraftKings points vs. the Reds. With his salary at $7,600 against the Cardinals tonight, we’ve seen a massive drop of $3,400 over the past month. Historically, drops like this have led to pitchers exceeding expectations.
With Berrios at home and a favorite — both are situations that have helped pitchers’ value historically — we see why the Twins’ young ace should be a consideration for anyone looking to roster a relatively cheap pitcher.
SP Tyler Mahle
On the flip side, Tyler Mahle of the Reds has seen a price spike of late, and he’s not exactly a guy who’s in the proper spot for one. Unlike Berrios, Mahle is an underdog and on the road, both of which are historically bad situations for pitchers. Now at $9,000, Mahle’s seen his price tag rise $2,700 over the past month, which has historically led to less value. When we add in those detrimental situational factors, we see that Mahle has the cards stacked against him in San Francisco tonight.
This situation gets even worse when we look at only pitchers who strike out less than a batter per inning, which Mahle does.
OF Rhys Hoskins
One hitter who I love tonight is big Rhys Hoskins. Hoskins has not been doing well recently, as he has just three extra-base hits over his past 10 games. Ironically, he’s hit the ball harder and farther over the past 15 days than he has over the past year, per our batted ball data.
With his lack of actual production, though, he’s seen a price drop of $1,000 over the past month. His spot against Andrew Cashner and the Phillies looks to be an exploitable one, especially given his bargain price.
As a whole, hitters have reached upside — at least one-half of a standard deviation above salary-based expectations — 15% of the time. That rises to 17% when looking at players with a price drop of $1,000, 21% when we add Vegas expected runs of at least five, and 27% when we look only at 1-4 hitters. So not only is he in a good spot to at least reach value and then some, he’s in a spot where hitters have exceeded value almost twice as much as average.
There are many other filters I can add and all of them point to Hoskins being in a smash spot. He has eight Pro Trends, and perhaps my favorite of those trends is recent batted ball distance over 235 feet. Hoskins’ is at 257 currently. If we tack that filter onto the picture above, we get just 10 matches since 2014, but a crazy Plus/Minus of +8.41. In a very rare spot, Hoskins is, but deny his high ceiling, you must not.
Photo credit: Geoff Burke – USA TODAY Sports
